My Family for the War (20 page)

“She knows someone who needs help,” I moaned. “A sick lady named Mrs. Soderbergh.”

“Wilma Soderbergh? I know her too. I was at her funeral just yesterday,” my foster mother answered coolly.

I wiped my hand across my face. “It’s too late anyway,” I said with a trembling voice. “My parents are in Holland. They like it there. They don’t want to come to England anymore.”

“What did they write, then?” Amanda asked, more friendly now.

I gave her the letter. “You can keep me,” I answered, and burst into tears.

Chapter 11

One day, about three weeks before the summer holidays, the teachers didn’t call us back into the building after recess like they normally did. Instead, they had us gather in groups around them and after a few minutes, Mrs. Collins came out on the front steps and called for silence.

“Today we’re going to have a little drill,” announced Mrs. Collins. “We are going to line up by twos holding hands. And once we’re all in order, we will march in line to the Underground station, like a crocodile!”

I couldn’t help but laugh. In Germany, we only had fire drills occasionally, always accompanied by a lot of noise and sirens. Here we marched blithely, hand in hand, through the neighborhood. It was strange, though, how the people on the street stood still, regarding us earnestly and mournfully as we cheerfully trotted past them.

My mother seemed to be enjoying the summer. She had found work at a gigantic strawberry farm, and the letters she sent me were covered with reddish stains. Her letters even smelled faintly of strawberries. At first I thought I was imagining
it, but when I held out a letter to Amanda, she smelled it too!

The letters from my father, though—two or three sentences scrawled in a thin, shaky hand—worried me. Four days after he went to the sanatorium, he was taken to the hospital for an emergency operation. It seemed my mother had gotten my father to Holland just in the nick of time, and by now I was very happy that they hadn’t waited any longer for my help.

Mine were not the only letters Mamu received these days. Amanda asked to borrow my dictionary. She disappeared for two hours, and when she returned, she handed me a densely written page. “Could you read this through and tell me what needs to be corrected?”

Eagerly, I threw myself down on the armchair and read aloud:

I put the letter down. “Don’t you dare change a single word!” I said.

Amanda grinned. “You mean it will at least give your poor mother a good laugh? Well, that’s fine by me!”

I got up to give her the letter back, and suddenly found myself in her arms again. I held Amanda so tightly that she gasped for air. “My mother would drop everything and come get me if she had any idea how much I love you!” I declared without thinking about it. Amanda didn’t say anything, but when I let her go, I could see her reply in her eyes.

If I thought we would see Gary off on a pier, or that he would stand, dressed in a white-and-blue uniform, on the deck of a magnificent ship, saluting as it majestically steamed out of the harbor accompanied by fanfares, then I
was to be deeply disappointed. We gathered at an ordinary train station in the south of London, which shimmered in the summer heat. Gary wasn’t even wearing a uniform. “A few months’ basic training,” he joyfully proclaimed, “and then we board ship.”

He gave me a brotherly punch. “Will you get a uniform then?” I inquired.

“Of course! Take a good look—you’ll never see me like this again!” he cheerfully ordered, a remark that didn’t improve his parents’ mood. Although they’d had six weeks to get used to the idea, I was still the only one who was happy about Gary joining the navy. Worse, Amanda’s dogged refusal to talk about it, even now, baffled me.

“I never found anything wrong with your appearance,” was her curt response.

“Oh, Mum!” Gary said quietly and put his arm around her shoulders. Even if she still didn’t answer, she tolerated Gary’s gesture, and after they had walked a few steps, she hesitantly wrapped her arm around his hip. I felt like a great weight had been lifted.

When it was time, dozens of future sailors stormed the train. “See you in December!” Gary yelled before the train started to roll, enveloping my brother and the other boys in a white cloud. That was it. No uniform, no tears, not a single grand moment. He was simply gone.

We drove back into the city in silence. I stared out the window and let the blurred landscape flit past.
Now I’m an only child again,
I thought, feeling depressed and pleasantly tragic at the same time.

But as the bridge over the Thames became visible, I
leaned forward eagerly. “Look,” I exclaimed. “What’s that?”

High above the city floated several silvery objects, moored to steel cables. They looked like giant inflatable animals. “Is there a holiday? A festival? A sporting event?” I wondered. In England, there were a lot of peculiar traditions, and I would have hardly been surprised at an inflatable animal race!

“Those are barrage balloons,” Uncle Matthew explained. “They must have started installing them this afternoon. If there’s an air raid, they’ll force the enemy planes to fly at a higher altitude, and that makes them less accurate.”

I almost asked, “Less accurate at what?” But it occurred to me that my foster parents weren’t in the mood to explain anything about war. So instead I said, “Or else the pilots will laugh themselves silly and crash in the Thames!” which to my delight elicited a little smile from Amanda.

Not that there was any getting around the topic of war. The newspapers were full of headlines like “Will There Be War?” and when we returned home from the station, a little brochure was hanging out of the letterbox. “I have three of those now,” Amanda said impatiently, and laid the pamphlet next to the telephone.

As I walked past, I glanced at the cryptic title:
Public Information Leaflet No. 3—Evacuation Why and How?
I made a note to myself to look up the new word
evacuation
in my dictionary later. That same evening, I was going to my room when I passed Amanda sitting on Gary’s bed, lost in thought. “Matthew and I have been thinking about something,” she said hesitantly. “I wonder, Frances, if you could imagine sharing our home with another child.”

Another child? At first I thought she wanted to have a baby, and I felt a pang of jealousy, but Amanda continued talking. “Gary’s room is free now, and the Refugee Committee is still frantically looking for foster parents for children from the kindertransport.”

I couldn’t speak. A dreadful roaring began in my ears, and Amanda’s silhouette began to flicker, as if she were about to dissolve into thin air.

“Frances, what’s the matter?” Her voice sounded distant and hollow.

“I have a friend,” I enunciated with great effort.

“A friend… ? But of course! Is she still in Berlin? What’s her name?”

“Her name is Bekka… and I took her place.”

It’s a strange feeling, seeing the floor come up at you. A sharp pain shot through my right arm, and then I was sitting on the rug, without the faintest idea how I’d gotten there. Amanda knelt down next to me and screamed for Uncle Matthew, and I cried loudly because I hurt my wrist when I fell.

Later, when I was lying in bed, I mulled over how the Shepards—after all the shocks and frights I had already put them through—could possibly be interested in taking in another unpredictable refugee child. In the middle of the night I got up, took a pen and pad, and for the first time in six months wrote the words
Dear Bekka
. They looked so wonderful that I got goose bumps, and I had to mutter the words out loud several times before I finally grasped that what I was writing to tell her wasn’t a dream.